Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart: A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges

Coaching high-powered executives requires something extra. Executive coaches must become partners whose emotional investment in business outcomes equals that of their clients. They must have the strength and courage to face an organizational leader in a time of crisis and speak the unvarnished truth. They must be a force to be reckoned with. They have to have backbone and heart.

When it was first published in 2000, Mary Beth O'Neill's book Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart helped to define the field of coaching at the senior and executive level. This second edition of O'Neill's groundbreaking book shares the secrets of O'Neill's success and details the techniques she's developed and refined over the course of her exceptional career. This edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to include

• THREE KEY FACTORS METHODOLOGY FOR SETTING UP CLIENT GOALS AND THE MEASURES FOR THOSE GOALS
• INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO INVOLVE THE CLIENT'S BOSS IN THE COACHING CONTRACT
• MORE EXTENSIVE MATERIAL ON LIVE ACTION COACHING
• COMMENTARY ON THE USE OF ASSESSMENT TOOLS AND INSTRUMENTS
• A METHOD TO WORK WITH CLIENTS ON THE SYSTEMIC PATTERNS THEY WANT TO CHANGE
• AN ENTIRELY NEW CHAPTER DEVOTED SOLELY TO CALCULATING THE ROI OF COACHING WORK WITH THE CLIENT
• AND MORE ILLUSTRATIVE STORIES

O'Neill teaches coaches how to deal with clients in terms of the "force fields" they create and react to, that is, the political and emotional climates within organizations that can ensnare both executive and coach and make for faulty decision making. O'Neill reinforces her observations on coach self-management and her systems perspective with a sound four-phase methodology for implementing both, a methodology that covers contracting, planning, live action intervening, and debriefing.

Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart is written for anyone, no matter what their discipline or background, who is interested in helping leaders work through their dilemmas so they can transform their learning directly into results for their organizations.